BLOVIATING ABOUT BICYCLING, CYCLE COMMUTING, PRACTICALITY, AND GREEN LIFESTYLES.
"The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart." --Iris Murdoch

Thursday, November 19, 2009

I swear to God that I didn't touch the thing; it was just right where I found it.

I have to admit, it's a little hard to imagine the circumstance that would allow a cyclist to just leave his left crank-arm and pedal sitting out there near the curb like this. I mean, clearly there was a missing crankarm-fixing-bolt, and I suppose that it's possible to lose one of those, (although I've never done it personally,) but how does this happen and you don't just reach down and retrieve the thing?

What's the most likely? Was it:

the cyclist was walking his bike and didn't notice;

the cyclist was walking his bike and too drunk to notice;

the cyclist had his bike on the back of his car;

the cyclist was riding and he and every bit of his bike except the left crankarm and pedal was hit big-time by an alien abduction ray;

Hey, Ann, good to hear you're a-bike! (My bike doesn't have a name, but I think of it as "Steed.") Claire and I saw the pedal / arm about a half-block from her apartment, walking on our way to ...Fiesta, to pick up dinner fixings.

I did talk to the guys at my local bike shop, and they said that they had a Rice guy come in with a bike that only had one crank arm. Supposedly lost it somewhere in the Rice/Southhampton area. The bike guys said something to the effect of "Rice people: smart enough to work at NASA, but stupid enough to not realize you can reattach parts that fall off bicycles."

Had a left crank arm fall off of my old Schwinn down by the old Strait Music location in downtown Austin circa 1992. I retrieved the arm (bolt was missing), but the square taper had egged out (over the unknown distance between when the bolt fell out [likely jumping down stairs on campus] and when the arm finally dropped), so I ended up with a new crank arm anyhow... I did, however, reuse the pedal (and clip) up until I sold the bike years later with a black arm with the 'rings and a chrome lefty...